The HIT Policy Committee’s Quality Workgroup should take a less-is-more approach to developing Meaningful Use Stage 2 and 3 reporting requirements, according to committee member and Epic Systems Corporation CEO Judy Faulkner. “I am nervous that the government is going to get into the EHR design business,” said Faulkner, who spoke following the workgroup’s presentation to the full committee. “In many cases, Group A likes something, but Group B doesn’t, and perhaps Group C doesn’t like it either — I worry that we are becoming Group A and expecting Groups B, C and D to like what we did.”
Contentious Privacy Recommendations Clear Committee
Devan McGraw and Paul Egerman, respectively chair and co-chair of the HIT Policy Committee’s Privacy and Security Tiger Team, entered this month’s full committee meeting looking for approval of the letter and recommendations they put together over the summer. And while they got that approval in the end, it was only after more than 30 […]
DARPA for Healthcare: An EMR Shootout
Building on a recent post about Peter Orszag’s resignation, and stimulus funding for healthcare IT…As long as we’re throwing money around by the billions… If I were Dr. Blumenthal, I’d dangle $500M ala DARPA in front of Amazon, Google, Nintendo, Facebook, salesforce, eBay– or any other capable body– and sponsor a shoot out: Build an inpatient/outpatient EMR and financial management system that will rock our world.
Privacy & Security Tiger Team Hunts Balance
The HIT Policy Committee’s new Privacy and Security Tiger Team workgroup is striving to establish the requirements that intermediaries in personal health information (PHI) message transactions will be subject to. Under HIPAA, parties which have access to PHI are deemed covered entities (CEs), required to establish business associate agreements (BAAs) which obligate them to handle the data in certain ways. With the rise of health information exchange under the HITECH Act, the Office of the National Coordinator created the Tiger Team to provide it with guidance in governing health information organizations (HIOs) — or third-party intermediaries which have varying degrees of involvement with the messages.
TEXT/PODCAST: One-on-One w/Former ONC Senior Adviser John Glaser, Part II
Over the past year, John Glaser, Ph.D., has been eating and breathing Meaningful Use and Certification even more than his HITECH-focused CIO colleagues. That’s because while Glaser has kept up his role as VP & CIO at Partners HealthCare on a part-time basis, he’s also been winging down to D.C. every week to fulfill his […]
A Comment Period of Uncommon Consequence
Whether a thing is determined to be good or bad depends on perspective. Who does the individual making the judgment represent? What are the criteria they are applying to their evaluation? While I’ve been sitting here for the last six months criticizing the heck out of the HIT Policy Committee, surely the individuals on that […]
TEXT/PODCAST: One-on-One w/Former ONC Senior Adviser John Glaser, Part I
Over the past year, John Glaser, Ph.D., has been eating and breathing Meaningful Use and Certification even more than his HITECH-focused CIO colleagues. That’s because while Glaser has kept up his role as VP & CIO at Partners HealthCare on a part-time basis, he’s also been winging down to D.C. every week to fulfill his […]
It’s Time for the Policy Committee to Get Serious
While all organizations have mission statements and basic objectives, the ability to morph those on the fly can be key to success or failure. Of course, it’s better when the organization itself determines the changes, and they’re not imposed from outside. That’s because outside entities can, of course, change their minds. I felt that way […]
HIT-Related Errors Center Stage at Policy Meeting
Safety concerns took center stage at the HIT Policy Committee meeting today in Washington, D.C., as Certification and Adoption Workgroup Co-chairs Paul Egerman and Marc Probst reported their recommendations on those issues to the full committee. The workgroup’s report was a refinement on an earlier presentation Egerman, a software entrepreneur, and Probst, CIO at Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare, gave after receiving testimony about HIT-related patient safety incidents on Feb. 25.
TEXT/PODCAST: A Plan to Approach Meaningful Use
The government’s Meaningful Use measures, and corresponding payments, are intended to incentivize the adoption of EHRs. The HIT Policy Committee recommends that incentives should be paid according to an adoption year rather than a calendar year. This implies that a first year incentive payment would be assessed for eligibility based upon the 2011 measure. (click […]